Shadowy Rebel Wields Iron Fist in Ukraine Fight

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Igor Strelkov after a news conference in Donetsk.CreditMaxim Zmeyev/Reuters

By Noah Sneider

July 10, 2014

SLOVYANSK, Ukraine — Late one afternoon last month, as separatist militia fighters and Ukrainian forces exchanged fire, a small-time thief by the name of Aleksei B. Pichko left his home on the southern edge of Slovyansk and headed for an abandoned residence at 17 Sadovaya Street. He had been drinking, and wanted to “see what could be stolen from there,” according to documents recovered at the rebel headquarters after their retreat over the weekend.

Mr. Pichko, 30, never returned. An order signed and stamped by the rebels’ powerful commander, Igor Strelkov, detailed Mr. Pichko’s fate: death by firing squad for pilfering a pair of pants and two shirts.

“They told me they took him to the S.B.U.,” said his mother, Maria Pichko, referring to the headquarters in this former separatist stronghold. “I don’t know anything more.”

The death sentence makes reference to a Stalin-era Soviet law, and in it Mr. Strelkov warns ominously that crimes “committed in the zone of military activity will continue to be punished ruthlessly and decisively.”

Mr. Strelkov, a native Muscovite whose real name is Igor Girkin, is a figure as mysterious as he is fearsome. On Thursday, he made his first public appearance after months of fighting, attending a news conference in the provincial capital of Donetsk alongside Alexander Borodai, another Russian citizen leading the uprising here.

Having lost Slovyansk, Mr. Strelkov has moved to assert his authority over the fractious separatist militias that are gathering in Donetsk and Luhansk, the other major city in the rebellious east, rallying them for an urban war that would be both bloody and destructive — not to speak of suicidal, in the eyes of many analysts.

“The enemy is putting Donetsk under siege,” Mr. Strelkov said, unsmiling, with his hands folded. “The situation overall is tense, but the militia are ready to defend Donetsk. They are counting on holding their positions on the edges of the city and on preventing the enemy from coming inside the city.”

An ultranationalist and reactionary, Mr. Strelkov fits an increasingly familiar profile in Russia, one that has emerged strongly with the re-election of President Vladimir V. Putin. Messianic and militaristic, such figures combine a deep belief in Russia’s historic destiny with a contempt for the “decadent” West, while yearning for the re-establishment of a czarist empire.

“Strelkov is almost a caricature of the Putin era,” said Mark Galeotti, an expert on the Russian security services at New York University.

A former intelligence agent, Mr. Strelkov fought in the post-Soviet conflicts in Transnistria, Serbia and Chechnya. Yet his ideological rigidity precedes any connections he has to Russia’s security services, stretching back at least to his days at the Moscow State Institute for History and Archives. There, Mr. Strelkov obsessed over military history and joined a small but vocal group of students who advocated a return to monarchism.

“This is a person who lives in the beginning of the 20th century,” said Aleksei Makarkin, who studied with Mr. Strelkov in college. “He was like this even back then.”

Were it not for the Ukraine crisis, he might have followed his passions mostly in obscurity. But he joined in the Russian takeover of Crimea and after that moved on to eastern Ukraine — with or without authorization from Moscow — where he consolidated control over the rebel military wing by imposing a system of dark and ruthless justice.

“When he moved into eastern Ukraine, I suspect, it was him taking his own initiative,” Mr. Galeotti said. “We saw him doing things that didn’t fit Russia’s direct game plan,” such as holding hostage for weeks military observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

With the Kremlin now talking about peace and ratcheting down the volume on its anti-Kiev propaganda, Mr. Strelkov may be facing a bleak future. He has been openly critical of Moscow for failing to provide more aid to the rebels, and has been criticized for it lately by Russian officials. But many analysts fear that Mr. Strelkov could go rogue, making it difficult even for the Kremlin to bring the warring parties in eastern Ukraine to the negotiating table.

From the documents left behind in his headquarters, it is obvious that he ran his own iron-fisted show in Slovyansk. In the fetid basement of his headquarters in the local security services building, which served as a dungeon for some of his dozens of hostages, a ceramic bowl full of prison food remained, uneaten and curdled. Socks still hung to dry from wooden sticks wedged into the wall. A plastic bottle collected drippings from the ceiling — water the detainees likely used to wash themselves with a single shared bar of soap.

Alongside Mr. Pichko’s file were documents detailing two other trials by “military-field tribunal,” which include handwritten witness statements addressed to Mr. Strelkov. In one case, a man accused of shining a flashlight to inform Ukrainian troops of rebel positions was acquitted. In another, however, Mr. Strelkov ordered the execution of two militiamen who allegedly kidnapped a local man and looted his home.

In all three, Mr. Strelkov emerges as a man willing to take extreme measures.

“They shot him for two shirts,” Ms. Pichko said on the dirt road outside her home, tears welling. “It’s not right.”

As Mr. Strelkov spoke on Thursday, rebel forces were engaged in an assault at the Donetsk airport, where black smoke rose into the evening. A Ukrainian military spokesman said that the attack was repelled, but reported the deaths of three soldiers elsewhere in the east — one killed in an ambush outside Luhansk and two by a land mine in a village near Donetsk. And along the border with Russia, Ukrainian forces seized control of a crossing at Chervonopartyzansk, according to the presidential administration.

Rebel leaders announced that they would be evacuating “tens of thousands” of people from certain neighborhoods of Donetsk in the coming days.

Mr. Borodai declined to say which neighborhoods, but said the evacuations would be voluntary, and were necessary to prevent a “humanitarian catastrophe.”

At the news conference, Mr. Strelkov appeared resolute, despite the Ukrainian military’s new momentum and the apparent change of strategy in the Kremlin. He revealed that he had indeed served in the Russian F.S.B., the successor to the K.G.B., up until March 31, 2013, but that he had left the service. Western governments say that he is controlled by Russia’s military intelligence service, the G.R.U.

Either way, there can be little doubt that he relishes the battlefield, and that he will be highly reluctant to give it up. He wrote about his attachment to war in his memoirs of the fighting in Bosnia, published in 1999.

“After the first euphoria — we’re alive! — came the sensation familiar to most professional fighters: the desire to risk it again, to live a ‘full’ life,” he wrote. “It’s the so-called ‘gunpowder poisoning syndrome.’ ”

Correction:

An earlier version of a summary with this article misidentified the city where Igor Strelkov made his first public appearance after months of fighting. It was Donetsk, not Slovyansk.

Sabrina Tavernise contributed reporting from Donetsk, Ukraine, and David M. Herszenhorn from Moscow.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Shadowy Rebel Flexes Iron Fist in Ukraine Fight. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe